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“She was stricken by a fever when she was not quite three,” he said, guessing at the reason for her hesitation. “She was sick for nearly a week, burning with fever, unable to eat, taken in fits...” His voice trailed off, remembering that week. He had been a boy of eight, terrified out of his mind. “My father nursed her.”

“Your father?” she exclaimed.

“My mother was too overset.” He paused. “The doctor told her it was a very dangerous fever, and Ophelia would likely not survive. He recommended we all leave and hire someone to care for her. My mother... objected.” He paused again; his mother had thrown a pitcher at the doctor’s head. He could still recall the sharp explosive sound it made as it hit the stone wall behind the astonished physician. “But my father took Ophelia in his arms—she was so small—and he carried her upstairs and bolted himself into the room with her. He wouldn’t open the door except to allow my mother to hand him fresh water, linens, and food.”

“That’s very unusual for a father,” said Mariah slowly.

“My father does not shy away from anything. He knew my mother was too upset.” Harry stopped. He remembered his mother pounding on the door, screaming for his father to let her in. He had hidden at the turn of the stairs and watched, cowed by the doctor’s somber warning and his mother’s hysteria. “Father came out when she begged him to open the door and let her see her baby before she died,” he said quietly. “He held her until she calmed down and told her he would not let Ophelia die, and he would not let her in because of the danger she would catch the fever herself or give it to me or my sister, Fanny.”

“Fanny?”

Harry nodded. “She is two years younger than I.”

“Oh. And then... ?”

“At the end of a week, Father came out of the room with Ophelia in his arms. The fever had broken at last, but she seemed to have shrunk, from a week not eating, and when she opened her eyes she saw nothing. It was a terrible blow.” Harry remembered thinking she might as well have died, the uncomprehending reaction of a child. He would never forget the sight of Ophelia standing in the middle of the kitchen, crying with frustration and fright because she could not locate her mother.

“My father removed everything from the room where she had been sick,” he went on. “He burned it all, even the clothes he wore while he tended her. And after that we all had our heads and necks scrubbed every day whether we needed it or not, as a guard against fever.”

“He sounds like a remarkable man,” Mariah murmured.

Harry smiled wryly. “Indeed.”

“And now, Ophelia... ?”

“Is quite well. She has the keenest ears and most sensitive touch. We none of us can sneak up on her, and my brother George has tried mightily.”

Mariah perked up again. “George?”

Harry laughed. “Yes, the youngest of us all.”

“I always wondered what it would be like to have a brother or sister.”

“It is a great trial,” he replied, and told her all about his brother and two sisters, how they played pranks on each other endlessly, but stood together when an outsider tormented one of them.

This was safe enough to share. Mariah would never picture a man who defied his father to join a troupe of traveling players instead of becoming a proper tailor; about a woman who was disowned by her wealthy, respectable family for running off with a penniless actor; or four children who were raised in numerous towns across England, sometimes comfortably and sometimes not, sometimes on stage and sometimes behind the curtain, before their father settled in Birmingham to manage a theater. At least he came by his gift for impersonation honestly, Harry thought. He had been raised to it.

He looked around the shadowy chamber again, a room almost as large as some of the lodgings his entire family had shared at times. The carpets alone cost more than his father made in a year. It was like two different worlds, Mariah’s life and his, two separate planes of existence that never intersected.

“Now tell me about your family,” he said, not wanting to think of the gulf that separated them. “Fair play, and all that.”

* * *

“All right.” Mariah could feel his eyes on her, and she straightened self-consciously. He was sitting at the end of her bed, just far enough away that she could only make out the pale shape of his face above his white shirt. It was easier to sit and listen to him talk, letting the quiet tenor of his voice swirl around her. She was determined to learn more about him, and he had a way of putting things that never ceased to make her smile. Once again she thought she could listen to him talk all night long.

“My father is a confidant of the Prime Minister. These last few years he was on government business abroad in foreign capitals. My mother also takes a keen interest in diplomatic affairs, and she wished to go with him. They took me along because I threw a temper fit when they told me they were leaving.” She smiled awkwardly as he laughed. “I was much younger then, of course.”

“And they humored you.”

She blushed. “Well—perhaps a little. But I am their only child, and they are very kind and devoted parents.” She hesitated again, remembering how well her parents had taken her refusal of Lord Hartwood’s offer. “But I suppose they do... indulge me more than is usual.”

“What is the usual indulgence, pray?”

He was teasing her again. She fiddled with the lace on her dressing gown, not in the mood for teasing. “I received an offer of marriage today,” she blurted out. “From a very eligible man.”

That silenced him. Mariah glanced up, even though it was too dark to see his expression.

“Shall I offer my congratulations?” he said at last, all amusement gone from his voice. It was a formal, impersonal tone she had never heard from him.